Quote:
Originally Posted by ScreamingViking
Depends on your definition of shitty.
Hamilton seems to have something for everyone. Four examples:
#1 - Rumpled, gritty, down-on-your-luck neighbourhoods: try any one of the ones east of downtown, roughly between John and Sherman, from King and Main to north of Barton... and again around Kenilworth Ave.
#2 - Pockets of industrial-area homes where real estate is cheap but the water bills will be high if you want to keep washing off the black/grey dust and grime that collects on everything, every day: anything along Burlington St., east of Wellington (and there are a surprising number of them)
#3 - Rougher suburban neighbourhoods where gang activity has grown and the kids have little to do: can be found in many blocks all across the central mountain roughly bisected by the Lincoln Alexander Parkway ("The Linc"), and parts of upper and lower Stoney Creek too.
#4 - Outer suburbia, if that's not your thing, where the homes can be nice but age fast, the box retail is plentiful, and you need a car (or two, or three) to get anywhere unless you really like to walk or take your life into your hands cycling: Ancaster, Waterdown, upper and eastern Stoney Creek, Binbrook, Glanbrook where it meets the original city.
However, despite their nature, they're not all bad. The good sides:
#1 - While the odds are high you'll run into a crackhead or prostitute trolling the streets, there are still a lot of very nice friendly people in those areas who look out for each other. Many are still home to residents who have lived there for decades and remained after their kids moved and they retired; not that that makes them nice by default, but plenty are salt-of-the-earth characters with common sense. And similar neighbourhoods in the lower city have rebounded from their lows or are starting to do so.
#2 - Heavy industry in Hamilton is slowly evolving, and even the steel mills may be much cleaner if new money leads to the technology the purse-holder says it can. And many of the houses, while cheap, are solid.
#3 - I'm afraid these areas will go down, before they go back up.
#4 - If suburbia *IS* your thing, you can have your slice of heaven.
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Hard to argue with most of that. One thing I've noticed in my ~4 years here is that it can change pretty quickly neighbourhood-to-neighbourhood (maybe that's true everywhere, I haven't lived in a city before other than student houses on the outskirts of Kitchener). I live just east of Sherman/ north of King, and about a 5 minute walk one way takes to streets I wouldn't want to live on, and a 2 minute walk the other way are streets so nice I could never afford them.
My own street is nice enough, lots of kids out playing and stuff, but the cops also regularly show up to the triplex on the corner, and I suspect the other triplex is a drug dealer. But at least the sketchy people walking down my street are recognisable as people who do live here and not transients, and nobody ever bothers me. One or two minor thefts.
I think that Tim Hortons Field has an uplifting effect on the surrounding neighbourhoods. Whether that's due to greater effort from the city to keep it presentable, the desirability of being near THF leading to better homeowners, some sort of self reinforcing loop idk. But I get the impression that without THF then the quality would just continue declining as you move east from DT and north from the mountain.
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